Conventionally, telecommunications and network infrastructure providers have relied on often decades old switching technology to providing routing for network traffic. Businesses and consumers, however, are driving industry transformation by demanding new converged voice, data and video services. The ability to meet these demands often can be limited by existing IT and network infrastructures that are closed, proprietary and too rigid to support these next generation services. As a result, telecommunications companies are transitioning from traditional, circuit-switched Public Switched Telephone Networks (PSTN), the common wired telephone system used around the world to connect any one telephone to another telephone, to Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) networks. VoIP technologies enable voice communication over “vanilla” IP networks, such as the public Internet. Additionally, a steady decline in voice revenues has resulted in heightened competitive pressures as carriers vie to grow data/service revenues and reduce churn through the delivery of these more sophisticated data services. Increased federal regulation, security and privacy issues, as well as newly emerging standards can further compound the pressure.
However, delivering these more sophisticated data services has proved to be more difficult than first imagined. Existing IT and network infrastructures, closed proprietary network-based switching fabrics and the like have proved to be too complex and too rigid to allow the creation and deployment of new service offerings. Furthermore, latency has been an important issue in addressing the processing of telecommunications, as more and more users expect seemingly instantaneous access from their devices.
The storage of session state associated with various telecommunications has become an important issue in this environment. Many types of telecommunication applications require very fast access to the data, such as random access memory (RAM) based access, while others can tolerate slower disk based speeds. At the same time, RAM is typically significantly more expensive to maintain for an organization that manages thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of telecommunications daily. What is needed is a way to efficiently store the session state data of these telecommunications such that various providers are able to provide low latency services and at the same time saving costs associated with fast memory access storage.